The Hair of Harold Roux (10 page)

“They didn’t need the tobacco,” Billy Benham said.

“You forgot the colored ribbons,” Janie Benham added.

And colored ribbons. So it happened that Janie, having taken her turn at the butter churn, went to the cabin door thinking she might be the first to see the Traveler’s canoe on the blue river. As she opened the door …

“There was the old lady!” Janie Benham said. Her hands kneaded his arm, their small strength great in her excitement. Her blue eyes were wide in anticipation, the whites showing all around, pure as the whitest milk. She breathed fast, waiting with an intense expectation for what she knew was coming. Billy, too, though a little cooler, stared at him, at the scene, waiting.

… As she opened the door she jumped back with a cry, for standing there, absolutely still, was a person, a small person all in brown, her brown deerskin dress touching the ground. It was an old, old woman, her hair thin and white, her old face as brown as her deerskin clothes. She didn’t speak or change her expression, just stood there with her bright old eyes staring at Janie. Her face was covered with wrinkles so deep, crisscrossing like the cracks in the mud of a dried pond, that her face looked like it could have been taken apart like
a jigsaw puzzle. Between the wrinkles her skin was as smooth and shiny as shoe polish. In her hands she held a basket made of water reeds.

Janie’s mother had heard her cry and came quickly to the door. She was startled, too, because the Hemlocks hadn’t had a visitor other than the Traveler for many years.

“Who are you?” Eugenia asked, but the old woman didn’t move or say a word. Only her brilliant old eyes moved from Janie to Eugenia, then into the open door of the cabin as if she were looking for someone else.

“Go tell your father,” Eugenia said to Janie, who made a wide circle around the old woman and ran to the storage cave.

“There’s an old brown woman!” Janie said. She felt like crying as she tried to tell her father and Billy, she was so excited and upset. “At the door! She scared me!”

Quickly they all went to the cabin, and the children, who soon looked to their father, saw a strange expression on his face when he spoke to the old woman.

“Who are you?” he asked, yet his face was puzzled, as though he shouldn’t have had to ask the question at all. He seemed to be trying to remember.

When the old woman saw him she moved for the first time, nodding her head, then holding out her basket to him. He took the basket, still puzzled, and nodded his head three times. The old woman, her face as unchanging as wood, nodded three times in answer. And from that time forward, Tim Hemlock never again tried to say words to the old woman. He handed the reed basket to Eugenia, then pointed to the cabin, made his hands into the shape of a roof, pointed to his heart, then to the old woman, and moved his hand in a slow sweep toward the door, bidding her to enter. She did, walking so smoothly it seemed she had no feet but glided over the ground. She went straight to the bench beside the fireplace and sat down, her worn and ragged deerskin skirt still covering her feet. Her hands were knobby; the brown fingers seemed to bend at the wrong places, the joints swollen and
painful-looking. But with smooth motions she seemed to be speaking with them just the same. She cupped her two hands, pointed to the basket Eugenia held, then made one hand act as the cover of the basket and opened this hand as she nodded. They all knew that Eugenia was to open the basket.

The children came up close to look. Inside the basket were various small objects, each wrapped carefully in a bass-wood leaf. First there were mushrooms, on top because they are fragile. Corals, pink, white and light blue. Morels, that look like brown sponges. Puffballs of pure white, that when sliced and fried taste like delicious meat. Beefsteak mushrooms, that look like their name. Oysters, because that is how they look. And then there were some strangely beautiful orange and yellow mushrooms the Hemlocks had never seen before and wouldn’t have dared to try if they had.

Beneath the mushrooms were perfect little birch-bark boxes fitting side by side. Eugenia took them out one by one and put them on the big oak table. On the top of each box was a picture of a plant cut into the birch bark, and inside of each box was a different colored powder, fine as flour. Billy, who liked to collect wild food, thought he recognized some of the plants in the pictures. There was goosefoot, arrowhead, rose-root, kinnikinnick, glasswort, purslane and dock. But many of the plants he couldn’t recognize. One box, full of a fine brown powder, had on its cover a picture of a gracefully drooping human hand.

“She says they’re a gift for us,” Tim Hemlock said.

“But what are all those powders?” Eugenia asked.

“I don’t know, but they’re a gift, so we’ll put them on the shelf,” Tim Hemlock said, and they did. They put the little boxes on the shelf over the fireplace, where they would stay dry. The old woman never moved or said a word, but her eyes were bright. In the following days they ate the mushrooms they knew were good to eat, but left the orange and yellow ones in their leaves on the shelf.

Time passed, and the old woman sat on the bench by the fireplace. She sat quietly, hardly moving, all day long. During
the early morning hours before dawn and just after, she was gone, but she returned sometime in the early morning to glide quietly to her place on the wooden bench. She ate very little and was no trouble, but after a week or more Eugenia began to get a little upset. She and Janie were out by the watering trough where Tim Hemlock and Billy were working, and she asked Tim Hemlock how long the old woman was going to stay.

“It isn’t that she’s a bother, but she looks at me all the time and it makes me nervous,” Eugenia said.

“And she smells funny,” Janie said. “She smells like sometimes when you’re taking a walk in the woods and there’s a warm sort of animal wave of air you don’t know where it came from but it’s different.”

“If I could only
talk
to her.” Eugenia said. “Who is she? What is she doing here?”

Eugenia asked because sometimes Tim Hemlock and the old woman did talk, with their hands, and no one else could follow their meanings beyond something simple like “Would you like some more soup?” which was easy enough to understand.

“I’m not sure who she is,” Tim Hemlock said slowly, the puzzled look on his face. “But I know we must let her stay.”

Later, when he and Billy were in the barn feeding the animals, Billy said, “How do you know how to talk to her, Dad?”

“I don’t know,” his father said. “My grandfather—your great-grandfather—could talk that way. Once when I was a boy, when I was about your age and one of the Old People came by, my father told me that. But he couldn’t do it. I don’t know how I know how to do it.”

“Is the old lady one of the Old People?”

“She must be the last one, if she is,” Tim Hemlock said.

“Were the Old People always old like her?”

“No. It’s that they were here before us.”

“And they’re all gone?”

“Men have thought so for many years,” Tim Hemlock
said, and Billy, seeing his father’s doubts and maybe even fears, said nothing more.

One evening, a cold, late November evening when the winter had snapped down hard and all the small cabin windows were furry with frost, Tim Hemlock said, “The Traveler isn’t coming this year. It’s too late. The ice is forming on the river.”

They had all been thinking this, but it was too important to talk about. Now they all sat in silence, for without powder and ball, and oil, salt and steel and flint, the winter would be long and hard at best, and at the worst they might starve. Janie saw the fear in her mother’s blue eyes and went to her, to stand between her mother’s knees and look up into her beautiful eyes that had turned dark, like the blue of a storm cloud you think is sky until you see it is really part of a dark cloud. Janie put her head against her mother to feel the warmth.

Billy was silent, too, because he knew how little powder and ball his father had left. Each year the Traveler could bring just so much of everything, because of the long hard journey up the river, so in the fall they were always short of supplies. He looked up at the long flintlock rifle that hung on its deerfoot racks on the log wall, at its full stock of bird’s-eye maple and at its brass fittings engraved with animals and plants. From its tang hung his father’s beaded leather possibles bag, and the small priming horn and the large powder horn, now only half full of black powder.

The old woman sat more still than all the rest, but now her bright eyes were upon Tim Hemlock, and she began to speak to him with her hands. He replied, and soon their hands moved swiftly, seeming to dance in the air, Tim Hemlock’s great horny working hands and the old woman’s small bent brown ones, gleaming in the firelight.

After watching this for a while Eugenia cried out, “What are you saying? What are you saying?” She was close to tears. Tim Hemlock and the old woman stopped moving their hands, and Tim Hemlock turned to Eugenia.

“She says the Month of the Iron Ice will be the worst,” he said. “I can’t quite understand all she wants to tell me.”

“It’s not right!” Eugenia cried. “Why can’t she talk?”

“She doesn’t know our language.” He saw how unhappy Eugenia was, so he went to her and put his arm around her. There was nothing he could say to reassure her, other than a lie, so he said nothing at all.

The children looked at the old woman who sat as still as wood, the orange flickerings of the fire reflecting from her dark face.

It was Janie who first thought she saw something stranger and deeper in the eye hollows of the old woman than any of them had ever noticed before. She said nothing about it, because even though the old woman wasn’t supposed to know their language she couldn’t talk about her right in front of her as if she weren’t there.

But late that night, after everyone was asleep, Janie woke up with a strange question on her mind, as though something had called her awake. The children slept on the loft at one end of the cabin, where it was warmest. Janie got up and put her quilt around her shoulders, for the fire had burned down low, and even on the loft it was bitter cold. She went around the log partition that separated her bed from Billy’s. It was dark, with only an occasional spark of flame from the fireplace that would dimly light the rafters and die down again.

“Billy,” she whispered. She had to feel for him, and found the very top of his head, which was the only part of him that wasn’t bundled up in his quilts and blankets. “Billy!” she whispered again. “Wake up!” She patted him on the top of his head.

“Umph grumph,” he mumbled.

“Wake up!” she whispered.

“Wha’?”

“Shhh!”

“Wha’ matta?”

“Wake up!”

Then he did wake up all the way. “What’s the matter?”
he whispered. “It must be the middle of the night.”

“It is. But there’s something very peculiar we’ve got to find out about.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“Yes, because she’s asleep.”

“Who’s asleep?”

“The old lady. She goes sound asleep. I’ve watched her. She sits there just like always, but she goes sound asleep. And there’s something we’ve got to find out. I don’t know why. But it’s her eyes. There’s something funny about them.”

“I know that,” Billy whispered back.

“But this is really strange. I’m scared to go down and look by myself, so you’ve got to come with me.”

“I don’t like the idea.”

“I don’t either, exactly, but it’s something we’ve got to do.”

“You want to look at her
eyes
? How can you do that if she’s asleep? And suppose she wakes up?”

“We’ve got to take that chance. We’ve got to, Billy. I don’t know why, but we’ve got to.”

Billy could tell that she meant it. His little sister was only six, but when she made up her mind it was made up. And he was curious, too, even though he was scared. So they fumbled around on the loft in the dark, finding clothes and putting them on, and Janie followed Billy down the ladder.

In the dying flickers of the fire they could see, across the room on her bench, the upright figure of the old woman sitting as straight as if she were awake. But they also heard the long, even breaths of sleep. Slowly, as quietly as they could, they crossed the room. The smooth breaths continued. They were both trembling with fear, yet they had to go toward the shadowy old woman who sat so stiffly upright in her sleep. What were they doing? They both thought this, but something seemed to make them move quietly, in stockinged feet, toward the very presence they feared.

“We’ve got to have a candle,” Janie whispered into Billy’s ear. “We’ve got to be able to see her face.”

Though it seemed even more dangerous, Billy took the candle from the table and lit it noiselessly from a small flame in the fireplace.

Nearer, the old woman’s smell grew stronger. To Billy it was like the first puff of air from the paunch of a deer as his father’s long knife freed the tripas from the body, or the way the very leaves could hold and keep the news of a black bear’s passage through them, so the hairs on the back of your neck stiffened almost before you could remember what the smell meant, and then when you knew, and looked around quickly for your father, it seemed that your stiffening hairs and not your nose were what had told you. To Janie it was the smell of small animals just after being born, a vixen licking her still damp kits deep in a moist cave. She had smelled it in the early spring when it came in a warm wave of air.

Closer and closer they came, the old woman’s body never moving at all, just the regular, even breaths. They had thought they were getting used to the old woman’s presence in the cabin, but now, at night, when everything was asleep, on this strange quest they knew must be guilty because they were so quiet about it, she seemed to loom above them.

Billy held the candle up before the ancient sleeping face. If the eyes had opened at that moment, Billy was sure he would have died of fright. But the eyes didn’t open. The wrinkled face shone, brown as polished wood, shining squares and diamond shapes and triangles cut by the deep cracks. The old woman’s mouth was closed, her lips folded and collapsed at the outer edges. Gray hairs curled and straggled from a black mole on her sunken chin.